[98] Having been captured by robbers and bound, he asked them who was the chief of this Gallic tribe. He was informed that it was Camillus, a man to whom he had done many favors. So he told them to bring him to Camillus. When the latter saw him led in, he greeted him in a friendly way in public, and scolded those who had bound him, for putting an indignity on so great a man through ignorance; but he sent word to Antony secretly. Antony was some-what touched by this change of fortune, and was not willing to see Decimus, but he ordered Camillus to kill him and send his head to himself.1 When he saw the head he ordered his attendants to bury it. Such was the end of Decimus, who had been Cæsar's præfect of horse and had governed Farther Gaul2 under him and had been designated by him for the consulship the coming year and for the governorship of Hither Gaul. He was the next of the murderers after Trebonius to meet punishment, within a year and a half of the assassination. About the same time Minucius Basilus, another of Cæsar's murderers, was killed by his slaves, some of whom he was castrating by way of punishment.
1 Velleius (ii. 64) gives a somewhat different account of the death of Decimus. "Decimus Brutus," he says, "deserted first by Plancus and afterwards plotted against by him, seeing his army melting away, took to flight and accepted the hospitality of a nobleman named Camelus, in whose house he was found by Antony's emissaries and slain." The Epitome of Livy (cxx.) says that Decimus was put to death by Capenas Sequanus by order of Antony, into whose hands he had fallen.
2 τῆς παλαιᾶς Κελτικῆς; "older Gaul," which, as Appian himself tells us in iv. 2, infra, means that part of Transalpine Gaul which was held by the Romans before Cæsar's conquests. Yet we know from ii. III, supra, that the whole of Transalpine Gaul was placed in charge of Decimus Brutus by Cæsar just before he embarked for Africa. These facts make it almost certain that the original text was περαίας instead of παλαιᾶς.
The Civil Wars. Appian. Horace White. London. MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1899.
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